On most CVs, languages get one short line near the bottom. If you translate or interpret for a living, that line is your entire profession, and a CV built on the ordinary template hides nearly everything a project manager or a head of language services wants to know. The translator CV is a different document, with its own numbers and its own conventions.
Put your pairs and their direction at the top
The reader's first question is which languages, and which way. "French, Spanish, English" answers neither. The profession writes pairs with an arrow: FR>EN, ES>EN. Source language on the left, target on the right.
In translation the norm is to work into your native language, so state that language outright, directly under your name. It is what makes the pairs believable. If you also translate into a language you learned, say so plainly and say who revises that work, because a careful agency will ask anyway.
Interpreters have their own shorthand: an A language, then B and C languages, following the classification used in conference interpreting. If you work both ways in a pair, write both directions. Proficiency levels on the European scale belong on an ordinary CV, and another article on this blog covers that languages section properly. Here the level is assumed. Direction is the information.
A header might look like this:
- Marta Kowalczyk, translator, FR>EN and ES>EN
- Native English. Commercial law and finance
- Freelance since 2016, member of a professional translators' association
Three lines, and the project manager knows whether the job is yours.
Specialisms need evidence
"General translator" is the least useful phrase in the business. Clients buy a field: legal, medical, technical, marketing, audiovisual. Two or three is plenty. Five specialisms on one CV read as none.
Each field needs proof, and there are several kinds:
- Document types. Contracts, articles of association and court filings for legal work. Clinical trial protocols and patient leaflets for medical. Operating manuals and patents for technical. Subtitling or dubbing scripts for audiovisual.
- Training. A translation degree, a specialist diploma, or a law or life-sciences degree from before you changed direction.
- A previous career. A former nurse who translates patient information barely needs to explain herself.
Marketing is the awkward one. Transcreation is not proved by a word count, so describe the kind of campaign and the client's sector instead.
The profession's numbers: volume, turnaround, days
A salesperson quotes revenue. A translator quotes words. Three figures mean something to an agency: your annual volume, the daily output you can sustain without quality dropping, and your turnaround on a large project. For interpreters the unit is days or hours, split by mode.
Some example lines:
- Roughly 400,000 words a year FR>EN since 2019, mostly contracts and litigation documents
- Usual pace of 2,500 words a day of finished legal text, including my own revision
- 120,000-word technical documentation set delivered in five weeks, working with a second reviser
- Around 60 days of simultaneous a year, EN>ES and ES>EN, in the booth and remotely
Those figures are illustrations, not norms. The right ones come from your invoices and from the statistics in your translation tool, and a modest honest figure beats a round one you cannot hold on a bad Monday. Rates do not belong on the CV at all. They go in a quote.
If you are early in your career and the totals are small, count what exists: test translations passed, volunteer work for a charity, a mentored project from your degree. Label each for what it is.
Interpreters: modes, settings and hours
A conference interpreter and a hospital interpreter do nearly different jobs. The CV should sort experience by mode and setting, not only by date.
- Conference: simultaneous in the booth, consecutive, whispered. Give days per year and the kind of meeting, such as European works councils, medical congresses or negotiations.
- Community and public service: hospitals, courts, police stations, asylum services. Hours count, and so does knowing the procedures.
- Remote: video, telephone, simultaneous platforms. State your equipment and how much of your work happens this way.
A court listing or a security clearance, if you have one, goes near the top.
Tools and post-editing, stated honestly
Name the translation tools you really use, two or three at most: Trados Studio, memoQ, a subtitling program if that is your field. Add what you can do with them, such as maintaining translation memories and termbases. A list of ten products proves nothing.
Machine-translation post-editing takes more nerve. Say whether you do it, light or full, in which fields and for roughly what share of your work. Say what you turn down too, if anything. Two mistakes are common: pretending you never touch it, and letting a reader assume that post-edited output was written from scratch.
Sworn status, certification and professional bodies
This part depends heavily on country. In several European countries a sworn translator holds a legal status granted by a court or a ministry. In the UK and the US there is no direct equivalent, and people rely on a certification or membership grade instead: ATA certification, a CIOL qualification, membership of the ITI, or AIIC for conference interpreters.
Write the exact grade, the year, and the pair it covers. Some credentials are awarded for one pair in one direction only, so a bare acronym can overstate what you hold. Check the current wording with the body itself, since grades and requirements change.
ISO 17100, the standard many agencies work to, generally expects them to document the qualifications and experience of their translators. That is a good reason to date your degree and your first year of practice clearly. Separate articles here cover where certifications and professional registration sit on a CV in general.
Agency, direct client or in-house: three versions
The substance stays the same. The order changes.
At an agency, a vendor manager sorts quickly. She needs pairs, fields, tools, daily capacity, availability and time zone, on one or two pages. Many agencies will have you fill in a form as well, and the CV is what gets you past the first filter.
A direct client does not care about your translation memories. They have a problem: an annual report to publish, a website to launch in a new country. Open with their sector and the documents you handle for similar organisations. The project-based structure described in the article on freelance CVs fits well here.
An in-house role calls for a conventional employee CV: teamwork, revising colleagues, terminology management, coordinating external suppliers, and meeting the deadlines of a legal or communications department.
Naming clients without breaking confidentiality
Most contracts forbid naming the end client. Describe them instead: "a European pharmaceutical group", "an international arbitration practice", "a UN-system organisation". The reader learns almost as much. Work published under your name, such as books or credited subtitles, can be named freely, and the article on portfolios explains how to present it. Never send a client's document as a sample.
The CV is your first sample
A typo on an accountant's CV is a slip. On a translator's CV it is a product defect. Every version you send, in every language, is read as a specimen of your work.
A translator's CV is judged twice: once for what it says, once for how it is written.
If you send a version in a language that is not your native one, have a native colleague revise it. There is a separate article on writing a CV in a second language that applies to everyone, but for you the bar is publication quality. Follow each language's conventions as well: quotation marks, number and date formats, capitalisation. An English CV with French spacing gives its author away in a second.
A tool like Postulit can pull a first structure out of your LinkedIn profile. The lines that matter, pairs, volumes and fields, are still yours to write.
Tonight, three lines
Go back to the top of your CV and check three things: the pair with its arrow and your native language, two fields with one piece of evidence each, and a volume figure you can defend. Then hand the document to someone in the profession to revise.